Monday 29

 Ice. Rain. Tree branches down. Lacey ice on branches. Wet rain on snow.  Ian across the street stopped and moved the branches from our driveway.  Bless his heart.  Crew here trying to straighten, collect, get ready for next moves.  Might go skating.  Might do indoor day.  C & e were watching a teen scary movie when I got up at nine.  One that Emma is ahead on in the series.  Dave just told me his hernia operation will cost about 1200 euros.  Private providers have been chipping away at health care services.  If he uses a state run operation he will have to go out of the city a distance and be on a list for a few months before it would happen.  Dang!

Christmas .2

Sunday 28th

Exchanged presents late this morning.  Again super bright sunshine outside.  Everyone happy with gifts, followed by two group photos, Dave providing foreground on the floor, Eliot and Dave in matching pjs.  Few more xmas cards.  Egg nog too rich Dave and I agreed.  Needs the brandy or rum.  Kids planning another sledding trip now after a snack lunch.  Still no tiny postcard from Widge.  First time in ? 50 years? Booklet from Watchman Nee from Petie.  Christmas letter from Helen Frink.   Garnet Hill linen sheets order a bust.  No delivery until Feb-March.  

Saturday Dec 27

E & E are making a video about something, using some of the figures from the glass case.  No interest in adding more decor to the tree.  Dave off on shopping missions.  I got to Wally's to find no flossers.  Flosser crisis.  Amazon get them here by Monday.  Cold and super bright now.  I had not realized how long the trip was, after leaving la plagne they had a three hour train ride to Lyon.  There they spent the night at an airport motel.  Flight to Amsterdam, four hours in the airport there before the Boston flight.  Walking in W's realized there had been no fruitcake on display to tempt me.  Bought one of those Panettone loafs.  Patsy also gave us one of her cranberry (or raisin?) breads.  Dave wants us to go to La Familia this evening and do the Christmas in the morning.  Cécile got a great night's sleep.  Dave still nursing the tail end of his cold, slept downstairs so his snoring didn't bother the others.  Eliot taller than in August.  Emma  more sure and graceful.  Waiting for the boys in her class to catch up with her, she told Bela.  Wants to move to Holland to find tall guys.  

unboxing day

 Asked Chat if I would like Underworld since I discovered that Chris Viala devotes three hours to talking about it for his end of year video.  That alone made me suspect I would not dig DeLillo that much and AI confirms it, especially with this line about what Handke features: Concerned with individual perception, the boundaries of language, and a skepticism of grand narratives.  Does Viala ever talk about Handke, not that that would matter much.  I enjoyed his takes on Schattenfroh.  Nope.  

This morning we wait for tech delivery from Dead River.  Called them but they have no idea of the route the truck is taking today.  Oh well.  Wait.  Pick up the car at 2 pm.  It closes at 3 pm.  

Yesterday we managed to rack up over 2k steps just here in the house.  Do that again today.  Really cold outside, below 10, will go up only to 17 or so.  

Found one person on Quora that Chat said sees Handke as an infJ!  Clearly wrong.  Playing Myers-Briggs as bad as astrology I guess.  Headache strong five minutes ago.  Diminished a bit since.  Wait before popping another advil.  Do a stretch walk around the house or something.  Rinse off some dishes.  

The painter's tirade against border fraud and the horrible stairway at the Festival theater is magnificent!  And not at all the work of a J but of an F in tirade mode, rife with cultural observations and niggles, perceptions and discernments about the deadly weight of bad design on the soul of the place and the souls of those condemned to climb the stairs and run down it.  77  "The painter stopped and laughed. 'Hm. What will I do? What will we do? Because my enemies elude my enmity.'" 

Dead River delivery.  If I had known the main office was in Philadelphia I would have switched thirty years ago!!!  Paid for the rental car too.  Bright afternoon, cold!!  High of 17 or so.  General Hospital on too.  

from John the literary historian---

I don't think I have anything as interesting to say on this subject as you guys have. To go way back, there was a time in high school where I thought about the priesthood, and though libido had pretty well convinced me by graduation that that wasn't the road, I was still torn at the end of h.s. about whether to go to Harvard or Holy Cross, the top Catholic college I'd applied to. 

  As I recall (and I wish I'd been a journaler, Phi), I stopped going to Mass by the summer after freshman year.  For me, the theology was crucial. Sometimes I wish it weren't. There is something good for manyin hanging onto community and custom, but I couldn't do it.  I would call myself an agnostic rather than atheist, in no small part because modern cosmology and physics are so mind-boggling. Sometimes I joke that I'm so agnostic I'm not sure I am. 

  Having a number of very smart friends at Notre Dame who are devout Catholics has been interesting. They were politically liberal and very often complaining about "the Church" but not inclined to leave. Catholicism has this interesting dual tradition of authoritarianism, including siding with Fascism, and leftist concern for the poor and suspicion of capitalism.

   There are times, including these last few months, where I miss believing in prayer. But a fundamental problem for me is that I have trouble imagining a god who would  need or want to be prayed to. 

   So here I am. Some nostalgia at Christmas and other times, but not enough to think about returning.

---

we watched the second Love in Barcelona movie from Hallmark Media.  Village in Euskadi famous for making azafran from the fields of crocuses.  Family over generations, village so remote no one can find it.  Sounds like the village we found and later got the photo of it from Bill Baker.  L'Alberca.  Wow that name came after only a few seconds of searching my mind for it.  

Waiting now for the plane to land and the kids to arrive.  Maybe by 10 pm.  Now almost 5 pm.  Bela on the piano now.  She found a house in Javea with a heated pool.  

White Christmas 2026

 second light snow shower of the morning.  Bela sent a jacquielawson proposing paris and javea.  Message from Gail Dorval with grandson photo.  Phil wants to know about Catholicism.  

That doesn't answer my question. Does Catholicism appeal to you at all these days?    If so, why or how?

Little factoid:   Harvard was established as a Congregationalist school,  Princeton was Prebyterian, and Brown was Baptist.  Brown was the first to dissassociate itself from religion.... P

---

Just the other day my 91 yr old retired French prof, Greorge, assured me that the church has

changed greatly and I should start going to services because you can now be an atheist catholic

and no one cares about theologies or such any more, it is all about caring and community.  If so

it looks like catholicism has gone full unitarian after all.  

Two years ago our dear friend from St Louis, Donald, retired prof of catholic theology at a small.

now closed, college came to visit us in Albuquerque.  That December he had gone to St Patrick's

Cathedral in NYC to become a Knight of Malta.  In Albuquerque one day he came into the living

room wearing his full knighthood robe and regalia, banner and gold medals.  His whole life as

a professor of theology he seems to have had no personal trouble with church teachings---i.e.

he's homosexual, every summer he went to France as part of an entourage of a gay aristocrat

there, parties in Tangiers (Malcolm Forbes et al), gay life all over the continent, no concern for

what the church may have had to say about such things. 

Years ago in Chicago a friend from Japan reassured me that no one listens to the pope.  His family

dates back to conversion to the church through St Francis Xavier (?), samurai links, etc. 

It is, it looks like, a great world religion.  Does everyone make of it what they want? Suppose so.

A mayor in a village in Spain was asked why the village that fought for the Republic against Franco

would continue celebrating all the feast days of the church they didn't support.  Do you think we're

Moors?  (Or did he say Do you think we're communists?  faulty memory here ruins the ostensible

punch line!)  

Actually the only other person who actually asked me point blank to join their church is the neighbor

across the corner, Doug.   Goes to the Unitarian fellowship here in town.  Child in a large family of a famous

(in his day) church historian at UChicago Divinity school, raised in the campus Lab school and high school (but

never completed college anywhere, chess wiz-computer genie).

In Bangkok we were taken to see one of the major temples.  Va's disability meant they had to find an elevator

that would take us up to the main level.  This meant we were taken behind the scenes as it were and

lo and behold the room was full of aspirant monks, teen boys, in their saffron robes, horsing around with

balls and games while their mothers cooked a big dinner for the temple.  The basement church dinner, universal once

again.  

What is one to do with all of this?  

Meanwhile Merry Christmas to all.  

The mid-state navigator assured Va the other day that this would be the first white christmas here in 25 years.  I don't think it is that long ago, so am polling my sources.  

HERE is the passage just read 11:42 in Handke's Across:  "Above them, there was not a star to be seen; only a blinking satellite flashed for a moment across a last hole in the clouds.  The leaf buds seemed to have blown off the trees, leaving a dead forest of swaying crags; the clumps of MISTLETOE in the branches were abandoned birds' nests.  The mountain was now inaccessible; and yet, wide open to nature's grandeur, I thought: This is the world!  Together with the beaklike shells of the empty beechnuts above me, the lights on the plain below were its capital city."  55 

Of course he has just killed a man with a rock, it seems.  The action against him would be a "challenge."

I belonged to the nation of criminals; no nation is more dispersed and isolated."  

Card game.  His names is Andreas.  X shaped legs hold up the table.  Maple.  "the dark green lanceolate tips of oleander bushes."  "Threshold, play on," Priest, painter, master of the house, inn.  

losing valuable things

 not understanding quite what happens.  Added lines to previous post but they didn't stay.  

One was thresholds, key term in Handke's Across.  Key term in one of my earlier phases.  And key to current life manners because we live now in two houses, multiple thresholds, back and forth, NE to SW. Two houses and back and forth, more thresholds, more passages.  

And, so?

Justin sent the piece he wrote about fishing with Joe and spreading the ashes. "Ashes for the Fish."  Joe has this good line---"Fly-fishing is the only thing that I do that is the thing that I do."

Talk about when he and Wendy started to separate.  When Justin was about fifteen.  Wendy found out after the fact, after the book appeared? that Joe and Lou Ann wrote The Letters together, romance novel in Lou Ann's mode with Joe as collaborator, letters back and forth over a fictional love affair.  And yet anyone who read the book would know that real emotion wrote the letters, joined the writers.  I recall that period very clearly.  Maybe it was because of that that I gave Joe a bit more distance.  I was pretty aghast privately that he had done that without Wendy knowing a thing about it.  I could tell he felt guilty about it too.  Were we ever friends?  Colleagues.  Older father confessor.  He once aligned me with Kafka's? tale about a sin-eater.  

Wrapped the basketball for Eliot in a big box to give him a bit of mystery.  Bela wrote cards explaining the special gift from her she wants for each---jewelry-making for Emma and basketball lessons for Eliot.  

Just as snow started lightly around 2 pm I sped out to Hannaford to get the things for our xmas day.  Turns out Bela wants the salmon dish.  Earlier I had made it to the dump.  After lunch we allowed ourselves two of Rachel's homemade cookies.  They look like treasures in the box she made up for us.  

Town tax bill arrive.  Not yet the water & sewer.  Total up to 8,681.!!  Paid in July 3901.  Owe now 4780.

Gulp.  Can we indeed afford to keep both houses?  This house in particular?  

I don't feel interested in reading the Wendigo stories.  Justin and Wendy knew all about them, the genre, which are called cryptid.  Described one creature called something like the squamp--squonk, northern Pennsylvania pig-like creature.  

"struggling across the threshold" at this very moment--23 our teacher historian Herr Loser muses over Virgil's Georgics 

In the market in front of the rack of berries a young couple were laughing and joking about the wonderful aroma of the berries they were buying, a splurge.  I looked more closely, uuuhh they look like albino strawberries, pine berries I think they are called, fancy label.  I'll serve them for our Christmas dinner and see what they are like. 

Waiting for Rachel

heavy gray skies waiting for snow later today.  

Salzburg!  I looked it up because Handke's man is walking around it, working in it.  McSweeney's posted it is where Sound of Music happens!  duh  doom scrolling a good term, no?

started reading The Willows, did some more pages last night.  Big deja vu sense of having reading it, way way back in the norton anthology days?  big sense from the book cover that a copy has long been upstairs in the alcove.  Did Nicholas years ago mention it favorably or someone else?  The Swede character in the tale I picture as Mark C just from his one year here, so perhaps I tried to read it at that period.  Do I reallyl want to read it?  those stories? Remember I trained myself to fall asleep fast at summer camp so I could not hear the weird tales of hands rising up out of the lake that the counselors regaled us with.  Why read them again now?  The prose style reminds me at once of Poe, surely Blackwood read lots of Poe, all of Poe, over and over.  

What do we want, do we think we want? Really want?  Dave said last night he felt better.  Oh, reminder that cousin Ricky wants him to contact him.  

Rachel and Justin knew all about Wendigo and other crypto creatures, I think they called them.  Cryptid. Great visit with them.  Tales about Wendy and Joe and backstories on some of their events.  Lou Ann as the pivot point in emotional terms for when they started to break up.  The Letters, the novel Joe and LA wrote together with Wendy not knowing at all.  I recall that whole thing very clearly.  Justin had to ask her not to come to the memorial.  In between Wendy and Susan, he had no choice.  Rachel gave us a beautiful box of cookies she spent all day making yesterday; home made jam too and coloring pens and a mandala coloring book.   

Monday sun

 22 Dec  Amarylis double in bloom.  Loving Handke's The Afternoon of a Writer.  Going to go all premature and fall back onto the old m-b grid and declare he just might be the great INFP writer I've been looking for all my life!  Intuition even a prayerful blessing as we've already seen.  Being alone yet not lonely key.  One book even given Feeling in the Title.  And finding the new, the next, the forward, the not yet as essential as possible.  There you have it.  And the feel of the voice just right, the feel of the perceptions and explorations.  Without judgments or warfares.  So may passages I wish I could just paste in and say Yes, yes, that's the way to say that, yes, that's how it is, that's how it feels.  That is what is most important in a scene like the one you describe and the sense of landscape you are moving in and through.  So glad Lentz told me to look into Handke.  I hope I will enjoy Fosse as much down the line, for now it is Handke.  

Then on 64 the whole Hymn to Beauty!  Followed by the scene with the imperious, stinking talker who destroyed the writer's cerebral castle of writing to be written. 

Fine for the writer to write this, but what then of the reader who has not written it but who has (only!) read it?  "By isolating myself . . . excluded myself from society once and for all . . . I shall never be one of them."  69 Can the reader not as well share in this (great, guilty) pleasure/honor/distinction/destiny/desire?

"You are a weakling and a liar," said the dancer.  So he/we needs a legislator figure after all.  Perhaps the J, of the J who is Shadow of the P?  A silent listener who issues not an unvarying rule but a wordlessly sympalthetic rhythm which discharges the parties into silence.  The ideal storyteller, the ideal audience for the storyteller?  

Writing did not bring me inner peace after all.  Only Translating can do that. "As a translator and nothing else, without secret reservations, I am entirely what I am; in my writing days I often felt like a traitor, but now, day after day, I feel that I'm true to myself.  Translation brings me deep peace."  77  His variation on Beckett's Fail, try again, fail better.  Or Booth's today is when they will see what a fraud I am.  

"the same urgency . . . allows me to be refreshingly superficial."  "by displaying your wound as attractively as possible, I conceal my own."  

"the writer followed him in secret (as he often did with friends as well as strangers) "  

the newscaster overpowered by emotion  "like a man clinging desperately to a window ledge from which he would fall with a scream."  

"Why was it only when alone that he was able to participate fully?"  so similar to Joe's early passage in his life story about his need to be alone.  

"Why was it only after people had gone that he was able to take them into himself, the more deeply the farther away they went?

such a lovely ending "To himself he was a puzzle, a long-forgotten wonderment."  quoting Goethe, "but I am nothing."  

The soft beauty of this book, the gentle wisdom, the light, radiates back into the earlier books and promises forward.  I've tried to read his books in the order of publication more or less.  This appeared in 1987.  Like Fosse's The Shining it could be used as a prayer book, read over and over again.  On a daily or monthly or seasonal basis.   This uses winter snow and snowflakes for the light, the light of snow up into the house at night.  

Should I re-write the whole piece into The Afternoon of a Reader?  

---

Now this week we are waiting---for the holy day but more for the kids to arrive.  TV feels empty.  Another Handke book awaits, Across and Repetition, both from 1986.  And the weird tales of Algernon Blackwood.   Can I read those?  "how lucky I was to have such a delightful and charming travelling companion as my friend, the Swede."  

from La Plagne earlier this morning

Sunday

Dave called.  Everyone else out skiing but he has a cold and earlier in the week was diagnosed as having an inguinal hernia.  Docs said to take it easy, has surgery scheduled for Jan 7.  Looking and feeling pretty punk.  Disappointed to see the new tree and how short it is, even up on its pedestal table.  Pleaded with a pitiful emoji gif of a baby-eyed chipmunk.  

Rachel going to stop Tuesday morning.  Have to remember when to shop, Weds is Christmas eve.  

Handke's Afternoon of a Writer now.  "As a rule, these blackouts were put on."  27 

"this circuit of classifications and judgments .  .  . " 33    warring cliques 

"he would be carried away by his words, and later, if the result was published, he would be seized with terror or shame--he would even feel guilty, as if he had broken a taboo."  39  

He doesn't say so but search discovers that he is wandering around Salzburg, Austria, where he lived for about eleven years.  1979-1988 

O holy intuitions, stay with me."  50 

It was only when nameless and alone with things that he really started  functioning. 52

Slowness is the only illumination that I have ever had.  53

Laundry cycle

same Friday morning.  Called Richard and placed order for four cobalt mugs to be sent to PT.  Washer has just quieted.  Misty, foggy morning, raining.  Headache, two advils.  

helpful post from Poetry Chaikhana

Issa   Buddha's body 

         accepts it . . .

        winter rain 

paid the Water Authority Bill.  $1.21  Now to pre-info the car rental at enterprise.  Late lunch party at Walters has us doubled over in sleepiness after tasting some morsels of George's fruit cake under the pretex-pretense of tiding us over.  

Nice meal, fun get-together, relentless rain entering and leaving.  George and Darlene (and Keith) helped us get in and out of the place.  Had stir-fry duck!  pretty good, just my sort of glop and rice.  

Sat morning

Gained about four pounds between the meal and George's delicious fruit cake.  Geo says Hal, his AI friend, assures him that being an atheist Catholic you find the miracle in walking together--three emoji faces with teeth bared.   

Am I ready to like weird literature, classics of the weird tale says the intro.  Just because it is Nicholas's newest interest?  Perhaps and then again perhaps not.  I never succeeded in being as enthused about the novels of Claude Houghton as he has been.  But give it a chance.  Not now though.  Now I'm still in love with the novel by Peter Handke and maybe all of his works.  One love affair at a time.  "Possible Misattribution: It sounds like a witty, modern saying, maybe from a TV show or a contemporary book, rather than a classic literary figure."  Puts me in my place it does this AI genius.  

"It gave him real pain to expel his breath after looking for so long."  114  Did Handke read Modiano before or during writing his book about walking and wandering around Paris and using all the street names and place names to decorate the book, sustain the narrative, create the inner life of Gregory from the landscape of the city?  Or even after?  Or never.  Does Paris make writers use its map to construct their books, it being the literary city qua non?  ". . . and in any event was totally free from envy."  "the poor peasants among whom he had grown up." 

Still sleepy from a nap when I read the last pages of Feeling so I will read it again.  Will also go on to start Repetition and two others.  

Yesterday or was it this morning I threw away a book from its place on the shelf here in the den.  Blood of the Lamb by Peter DeVries.  My name in pencil on the first page with the date 1962.  Hardback with a plastic cover taped on it.  1962 was senior year, graduation from high school.  I had bought the book and read it because Brother Richard had mentioned it as one he had enjoyed, his laughter about it suggesting how much fun it contained, provoked, invited.  A satirical novel, maybe a bit like Evelyn Waugh?  A New Yorker writer.  Brother Richard brought old new yorker to the classroom, put them on the large wide windowsills of the classroom.  Anyone who got their work done early and had spare time could pick them up and leaf through them, read anything in them.  Did I laugh when I read the novel?  Did I understand it as easily and deeply as Brother Richard had done?  Or did I read it so I could drop casually at some point that yes I had bought it and read it and he could see how much his opinion meant to me.  No memory of whether any of that took place, no memory either of whether I did indeed enjoy the book.  It was the trophy value of it.  I had no idea of that at the time.  Why did I want to throw it away now, after carrying it around the country since 1962 and making sure it had a place on honor among many other sorts of trophy books gathered for many sorts of reasons?  Not sure.  Some sadness or reproach or loss it carried on its spine, some memory of high school confusions, longings, aspirations I no longer wished to see on a daily basis, out of the corner of my eye every time I entered and left the room.  

True Feeling

 Handke takes me into places where I had thought a week ago that only Fosse was trying to do.  More of a surprise in Handke.  This novel feels so unusual and fits my readerly wishes and hopes in unexpected ways every line, every paragraph.  I thought, oh, its a Rohmer movie, maybe.  No.  It is Handke and only Handke.  Still learning how to read him.  More delight in that than, ok, Lentz.  I finished the section before Washed and almost want to go back and read it again before going on.  

"He hadn't wished for a sign, but now unintentionally he had E X P E R I E N C E D one. 82

looking up and pasting in google text now feels like committing the worst sort of clerical apostasy, heresy, violation of the whole essence of writing and bookness --- 

Yes, the Austrian author Peter Handke's later work is particularly associated with the search for and experience of a 

"nearly mystical truth" or a heightened perception of reality, often tied to a quest for meaning that lies beyond the surface of everyday life and language. 

Key aspects of this include:

• "A Moment of True Feeling": His novel of this name explores a character who finds meaning when the world becomes "mysterious" and he can connect to it in a non-routine way.
• "Images" and Visions: In works like The Loss of Images (German title), a character experiences her interior life through "images"—a kind of "mystical, hallucinatory vision of landscapes and places"—which is central to the novel's experience.
• Metaphysics and Perception: Critics note a "metaphysic developed in Handke's newer books, which aims to translate the seen and perceived into language". His writing often works from "an area beyond psychology, where feelings acquire the adamancy of randomly encountered, geologically analyzed pebbles," as noted by John Updike.
• Beyond the "Linguistic Surface": Handke has evolved in his career from emphasizing the opacity of language to being "more and more concerned with the possibility of a nearly mystical truth lying somewhere beyond this same linguistic surface".
• Spirituality and Contemplation: While Handke is reticent about using the word "spirituality" too often, his travel writing and notebooks, such as Traveling Yesterday, include annotations with biblical citations and reflections about God and the divine, indicating a clear engagement with spiritual ideas and contemplation of Romanesque art. 

Handke's writing is often described as seeking to "do the world justice" by finding a language that captures an authentic, if elusive, reality or truth. 

------  bravo for this  ----next---how much has Fosse been influenced by Handke's work?  

Jon Fosse has acknowledged Peter Handke as one of his 

favorite authors and a significant influence, although the precise extent of the influence on his style is nuanced. 

Fosse considers himself a "Central European" writer and lists Austrian authors Georg Trakl, Thomas Bernhard, and Peter Handke as key literary inspirations. He has also publicly defended Handke from political criticism, supporting the decision to award him the Ibsen Prize in 2014 and the Nobel Prize in 2019, stating Handke was a worthy recipient based purely on literary merit. 

In terms of literary style, Fosse's work shares a minimalist, spare quality with Handke's, focusing on the "unsayable" and human anxiety, but critics often draw stronger direct comparisons to Samuel Beckett in Fosse's use of repetition and exploration of existential themes. While Handke's work is known for its linguistic ingenuity and experimental nature, Fosse's is characterized by a "quieter disturbance" and a focus on internal rhythms rather than the rage or theatricality sometimes found in other influenced writers like Bernhard. 

In summary, Handke is a highly admired and acknowledged influence, but Fosse has developed a distinct style that uses similar minimalist techniques for different emotional and thematic effects.  

Thursday Dec 18

Question now is how much penalty charge Irving will levy for breaking away.  Nice woman on the phone, thrilled that I am "moving to New Mexico."  

note to Dennis --- 

Enjoyed seeing how the saga ends.  Loved how you gave

Rodney the best line too ---  "“I like it best when everything is quiet. When you can hear your own heart pounding.”  sweet scene, hooray for Stella heading west and fine fun touch with the stranger and the painting.  And the price!!  

Hope you enjoyed spinning it out and that it helped you through this strange, unnerving? period for you.  Surely the chapter page will turn. this is far more than beckett prepares us for in Godot!!  I was listening to an interview with Peter Handke and he says he tries to write from a place and for that place within us that is beyond all arts, whethervisual, verbal or aural.  again it feels as if aging itself drags us there no matter what all else we try to do about it.   

oops

he said later that the book is not finished.  Few more weeks/months it will be.  Wants to know why I like Rodney Plunkett.  Is it just the name?  His haplessness?  

monday 15 December on through tuesday Dec 16

 lost all the precious stuff put into yesterday's post this morning oh well 

"In any case, he thought, a person with a face like that should keep quiet.  With such a mug you've got to have your nerve with you even to carry on conversations with yourself."  33  Handke 

"He was in the mood to underscore every line."  39  I could look up Handke on YouTube for his most recent interview, see what he looks like and sounds like, see how he appreciates me for reading him now.

"At a bookstand Keushnig bought three diner's guides.  He would read them from cover to cover.  One more thing to go by, he thought."  46

Tuesday  Dec 16   Listened to some interviews on youtube with Handke while driving around.  Love everything he says.  Next few pages when K is outside Elysee Palace just beautiful.  Listened to Fosse too, he is musical, as you can tell from the flow of the prose.  Nicholas sent word about Algernon Blackwood, much more about weird dreamlike He posts on his blog --- As I read on, this became increasingly apparent, whether or not particular details were being 'made up', the whole fitted into a deeply believed imaginative whole, and the imagination, properly exercised, is itself a way to truth. We are in a deeply 'Romantic' territory more akin to Blake and Coleridge or Novalis than any of Blackwood's contemporaries (unless possibly his indigenous contemporaries, some contact with which Blackwood had sympathetically had in North America), and it is a territory in which I find myself most at home. Blackwood has a distinctive view of how the world is, and the stories are slivers of this world, and their realism comes from being parts of a wider imagined whole (built upon more expansively in his novels). "  Makes me want to ask Matt Cheney if this is the same territory he enjoys the most.  

from a 2015 entry on a blog called Truncheon  or antimatter-camerlengo.blogspot.com  Reading Blackwood, one gets the very distinct sense that he actually liked men. I'm not being a bigot here- whether he intended to or not, there's plenty in his work that could be constituted as "homoerotic." He often had several flattering physical descriptions of his male leads, and even longer descriptions of their closeness to other characters. This closeness of course, is only between two men. Despite some notable female leads (The Lane that Ran East and West, The Touch of Pan, The Empty House's Aunt Julia), the majority of his characters are men, and they happen to be men who are often in situations that have them get close with other men. Without further ado, let me give you some horribly decontextualized, eyebrow-raising snippets from his works to try and paint Algernon Blackwood as Anglo-American horror's LGBT representative. Of course, these examples could simply be my mind jumping to conclusions. 

on another topic I cheated and asked ChatGPT to do my readerly duties for me---it is amazing what a great job it did---in one sense of course--the old masterplots readers digest mode that worked for earlier generations of overloaded readers.  here it is ---  

Plot Summary

Set over several February days in 1952, the story follows a close-knit group of queer hustlers, drifters, and bar regulars centered around Stella, the narrator, and their friends in a wintry city neighborhood. Much of their daily life unfolds in bars like Xeno’s and on the streets, where they survive through sex work, petty theft, and informal economies while constantly navigating police harassment and violence.

Stella, tough, volatile, and fiercely protective, becomes fixated on the idea of self-reinvention. As she turns forty, she talks about quitting swearing, giving up hustling within ten years, and eventually opening a respectable tearoom for society women—an unlikely dream that nonetheless takes hold after a brutal winter and a street attack that forces her to defend herself physically. Despite her rough exterior, the assault crystallizes her belief that dignity comes from strength, not politeness.

Around them, the dangers of their world remain constant. Corrupt and abusive police target the community, including a notorious officer who is quietly fired after raping a runaway girl, though he avoids prosecution. Friends and lovers drift in and out: LouLou fights back against harassment, Rodney narrowly avoids police entrapment, and Dextrose describes surviving jail through a coercive sexual arrangement. Violence and exploitation are routine, but so are loyalty and care.

A parallel thread hints at deeper corruption and crime. Michael Rudd violently assaults a man he believes was involved with his wife before her suspicious death, reinforcing the sense that murder, bribery, and silence underpin the city’s order. Witnesses choose not to speak, knowing exposure would destroy them.

As days pass, the narrator continues pickpocketing to survive while observing shifting alliances, drug dealing, and the arrival of a striking new red-haired police officer whose presence unsettles and fascinates the community. Stella ultimately recommits to her long-term plan of escape and reinvention, insisting that she, the narrator, and possibly LouLou can someday leave hustling behind and start fresh—symbolized by a planned summer trip to San Francisco.

The story ends with an unsettling reminder that the past cannot be fully escaped: a man recognizes the narrator as the subject of a nude painting he owns, revealing how exposed and commodified their lives already are, even as they dream of becoming someone else.  

here are the final lines in real prose ---- john rechy inspired? or another similar writer --- 

Xeno’s for supper. Floyd and me. Rodney Plunkett comes and sits with us. No Coralee tonight. Xeno’s is only doing a floor show on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights now. New pissant policy. Maybe that will change when the weather gets warmer and people come out more. Katlyn is in Chicago doing some clubs up there. Stella comes in and plops herself down.

“What a day,” Stella says. “Fucking and plowing. Fucking and plowing. Got me an old friend, remember the guy I call Turberville Danny? Hell, he was in the tearoom today. Haven’t seen him in ages.”

Turberville Danny had Stella hook me up with him once. As soon as Stella says his name, I remember him. He was a funny fart character. Only wanted to try me once. Guess he is not bent my way. He fucking talked a lot.

“Shit,” Stella says, “he never shuts up. I was fucking blowing him, yabber, yabber, yabber. Then I was fucking plowing his goddam ass and that bastard never stops talking. More yabber, yabber, yabber. Fuck me if I was listening. Hell shit fire, oh, the swearing. Old Stella’s foul mouth…Anyway, he jabbered and jabbered and jabbered all the time old Stella worked him over. Paid me $200.”

“Well,” Floyd says, “did you enjoy it.”

“Oh, honey,” Stella says, “heaven on a clam shell, Old Stella loved it. With kick smoke Danny jabbering away.”

“Well,” Floyd says. “That’s the important thing.”

Rodney Plunkett says, “I like it best when everything is quiet. When you can hear your own heart pounding.”

“Sweetie, little man,” Floyd says.

Rodney puts his small hand on Floyd’s big hand. It’s such a gentle gesture, I just melt. These sweet gentle gestures so often get lost in our lives. 

Then I see someone that breaks the mood. The man I saw the other day on the subway platform, or was it in the fucking street. “Do I know you?” he said to me and I ran away. Shit. Why is he here. Damn fuck shit, he’s walking this way. Damn, damn, damn, is he going to create a fucking problem. How does he remember me? I never lifted his wallet. Did I? Fuck vomit shit piss. Damn. Damn. Damn.

He pulls a chair from an empty table and sits with us. “I know you,” he says to me. “I bought a painting,”

“Oh the painting we forgot to fucking see,” Stella says. “Remember, we bought Coralee’s photos that day. Only one swear. Getting better, old girl.”

“Anyway,” that stranger says. “You were naked in that painting. That Daffodil woman said she could try to convince you to pose for another and I said I would buy it.”

“Obesession,” Floyd says. He turns to Rodney and they chuckle.

“No thank you,” I say.

“Say, honey,” Stella says, “How much did you fucking  pay for that painting?”

“$300,” says this guy.

in other news  ----  signed up with Dead River---the staff guy's name is Andrew---took that as a good sign----moved up from Salem a few, five years ago, now lives in Bristol, coaches high school wrestling.  Feels good to have made the change.  Like the website already, much better than Irving's. 

Also liked so many details in the interviews with both Handke and Fosse I'll have to log them more carefully.  I ordered the books Nicholas wrote about and I will see if I can read them.  His description and explanation is much more clear than some of the earlier discussions.  Perhaps I know more what to expect. 

Both Fosse and Handke speak about the inner silence from which their writing comes from.  I like how Handke ways literature is not like music.  Later he allows the visual to be invoked, for him film, cinema.  Of course, his friendship with Wim Wenders and writing for the great film Wings of Desire.  And his directing of Left-Handed Woman.  The way he talks about Cezanne's monte sainte-victoire and Giotto--that their images are beyond genius.  Genius, like Beethoven's, is too dramatic.  The art beyond genius speaks from deeper, deepest inner silence.  

It is clarifying for Nicholas to explain that his sense of the spiritual, while earlier he used Jung to help describe, is more aligned with what we now call weird literature.  Which is to say ghost stories and mysteries.  (Note too Barbara Schwartz's love of ghost stories.)  

"As I read on, this became increasingly apparent, whether or not particular details were being 'made up', the whole fitted into a deeply believed imaginative whole, and the imagination, properly exercised, is itself a way to truth. We are in a deeply 'Romantic' territory more akin to Blake and Coleridge or Novalis than any of Blackwood's contemporaries (unless possibly his indigenous contemporaries, some contact with which Blackwood had sympathetically had in North America), and it is a territory in which I find myself most at home. Blackwood has a distinctive view of how the world is, and the stories are slivers of this world, and their realism comes from being parts of a wider imagined whole (built upon more expansively in his novels). 

The writing is excellent - beautifully descriptive both of the natural world about the characters and of the characters' own psychologies - and the often mutually accumulating suspense of mystery. Delightful to drop into a new writer able to extend the possibilities of the world and your own imagination, and who is emotionally satisfying. I look forward to reading more."

Snow Sun Day

All morning, more than we had expected.  Saw the kids on Rock U.  Eliot singing, on bass and on drums, Emma singing and on bass with her group, The Internet.  What a difference in development for each in the year.  Both on stage presence superb, Emma even more graceful.  Nice voice, pre-lanadelrey, hope the fam sees that as praise.  

Bela finishing Sound of Music.  

I am back to A Moment of Feeling, which I love, line-by-line.  Amazing in each paragraph.  The sound of water flowing in the gutter of the street---"It gurgled over an occasional jutting stone, and the longer he listened the more his vision expanded; the flowing water turned into a brook, whose gurgling flow related to an almost forgotten event. The pencils . . . and suddenly Keuschnig couldn't remember his own name. . . out of danger . . . . yet always come back to this place . . . . an embodied wish . . . or a long-outgrown memory a present emotion. . . .as if it were somewhere high in the sky. Ecstatically Keuschnig closed his eyes to keep from crying, but also to relish his tears the more." 22

ugly suffering  but if someone were to understand him silently then he would feel disgraced.  !!!!

Panoramic coward with the eyes of a glider pilot.  

Saturday 5:26 pm

 Fosse's A Shining  a remake of Jack London's To Build a Fire? but with surprise at the end: "we walk barefoot out into the void, breath by breath, and suddenly there's not a single breath left but only the radiant, shimmering presence that lights up a breathing void, what we're breathing now, with its whiteness."  

Sleepy day all day after cold morning waiting for the oil truck and heat to come back on.  Temps now back to usual.  Chatter on news tv about shooting at Brown.  

Bela sleeping all evening, even though we put on The Sound of Music.  Heavy cream clam chowder calcium?  Stress of the morning meltdown and cold house?  

A Shining----really seems as if I did read it before!  Only two years old but still.  I think I read it along with starting the Septology as was too impatient or something at the time to give myself fully to it.  

Berkshire Fir

 thin tree, 4.5 feet.  Will disappoint perhaps but much easier and cleaner.  Balsalm Hill artificial tree.  Calling the shuttle soon.  Plan to leave the tree in place all year, lights off or on.  Kids leaving on the 1st so be here six nights, five take out the arrival night and factor jet lag.  Great chat online with them yesterday. Tomorrow the big rock u concert all day long.  

Still reading Antunes, two pages a day.  Now to start Handke's A Moment of True Feeling, 1975. Written in Paris in 74.  For Fosse am going to leap ahead and start A Shining and put the Septology on back burner.  A Moment is from 2023, after all the prizes but before the Nobel?  Le Monde blurb on back cover calls him the Beckett of the twenty-first century.  Guess we will go out to walmart later this morning.  Xmas photo cards all addressed and stamped.  

"; I can't conceive of continuing to live as I've lived up until now, but no more can I conceive of living as someone else lived or lives."  8 "Keushnig had always been curious, though he disliked involving himself in things."  

Great line.  My whole view of things.  That paragraph, that page, the whole book, that is how I coulda/woulda/shoulda written some books about our travels.  One book for each two week stay in all of those places.  

Now Saturday morning.  Sure enough, no oil and only enough hot water for my shower, gave out during Bela's shower.  Then I melted down.  Headaches now, after breakfast.  Called Irving after checking the oil tanks.  So want to switch to dead river and see if their service would be any better.  This no oil happens every year at this time or so it seems.  Seems like the familiar pattern year after year.  That was what the meltdown was about.  Mostly.  Rock U concert tomorrow not today.  Parkinson's caused more by water supply contamination than genetics, new theory.  Headaches mostly from dry air, allergies.  dehydration.

Guzzling fluids to test out.  Even drinking Mormon tea.  More peace of mind to switch from Irving to Dead River in the summer rather than in the winter!! Before the next fixed price contract gets inked again. How do I know if Dead River having same problem with supply brought about by this cold spell showing up earlier and for longer than algorythmic history predicted?  Still my Intuitive sense always kicks in at this time of year.  That might be much more reliable than algos which are mechanical-electro and not nearly as connected to the universe as is the human body divine.    

What was the meltdown?  Just as well to call it a Visit from Pan.  A gift of the gods, divine energies terrorizing us, remarking our lives.  

Fosse and Handke counterbalancing.  Wandering Paris meaning lost.  Drive into the forest no idea where or why.  

"It was so cold

that no sooner had the clouds of smoke rising from the fire left the shelter of the boulder than they dispersed into wisps and vanished."  53   Is there a German song called The Left-Handed Woman or did he make it up?  Nope.  American blues singer Jimmy Reed sang it in 1964.  Must be on Youtube then.  Well, it is cold today, super bright sun on snow.  Wind picking up and will more so later.  I hope we can stay home.  Colin canceled piano because school canceled, carbon monoxide problem with the heating plant. 

Handke's slight novel is just wonderful.  So hard to describe exactly why, how.  Poetic not the right word because that has too much universal baggage with it, that word.  Surprising line after line, paragraph after paragraph.  Intriguingly so, a kind of fascination with the scene and characters and what exactly is going on that is just unusual, idiosyncratic.  Again, too ponderous a word.  They are hiking in the cold on a mountain side.  She recalls an abstract painting exhibit by an American of the stations of the cross and the effect on her vision of blurring after image of moving from the black painting to the white painting, from descent to tomb/resurrection.  

Fall in the garage

just now as Rachel and Bela set off to swim.  We picked her up, put a bandaid on the scraped left hand.  All seems ok.  Fingers crossed.  Super cold this morning in the house.  Thermostat had the glitch message on it.  Bela wants me to check at Harris furniture on the missing part so I suppose that will shape part of my day.  Why not.  Do we need more caffeine?  Or just water?  

Dec 10 Wednesday

No significant bumps from the fall.  Visible bruise on Bela's left temple.  They had a good day swimming and lunching.  Took a good snap of Rachel and Bela.  I dined at the gas station on pizza and pizza and chocolate truffle square.  Two guys lunching I guessed to be high school teachers at one of the charter schools in the area.  Assorted other visitors.  Stocked up on everything we need to get us to departure.  Sure love the notion of departure soon.  This weather hangs heavy.  Gray skies again this morning, yesterday was sunny at very cold.  Warmer this morning.  Meredith dental visit and then pcp visit in late afternoon.  Thought I would try to figure whether we need drug insurance for Va's drugs.  Soon as you look into it lightly it becomes a dizzying whirl of options and coverages none of which are clear to figure out.  Forget it.  Signing up with Humana to replace Cigna.  Why?  Who knows.  

In Left-Handed  "A man came into the snack bar; he was bent almost double and had his hand on his heart.  He asked for a glass of water and gulped it down with a pill."  33  Sounds like John Sitter might have this condition, the one Paul Estes had.  Hope not but his email the other day said Legs are actually OK. Something neuro-muscular seems to be affecting my back and neck, so that after standing or walking a few minutes I bend forward uncomfortably. We see the voice doc tomorrow and have another MRI* on Thurs.    Hope to know more (something) soon.

  John

* old joke:

     A:   I had a brain scan.

     B:   Did they find anything?

     A:   No.

     B:   I thought so.

-----

"There's a delicate beauty about it that moves me deeply."  H 34  

Long slow drive home on icy roads from Meredith in steady snow much more than predicted, still going. So good to be snug again in our mountain cottage and have canceled the 4 pm appointment at Boulder Point.  

earlier to Phil 

Hi  Snow/rain mix today in NH.  Always fun.  At Va's dentist now, just canceled her annual pcp visit for 4 pm today because of the snow and it will mean night driving home.  I don't need either of those.  

Day off yesterday.  Va had a fall in the garage when the helper came to take her swimming.  Bruise but no other hurts and they enjoyed their swim hot tub and take out lunch.  I managed to "shop" at our three stores, two grocers and one walmart.  Saw people.  No chats.  Had lunch at a roadside diner, perched on one of those damned high stools, schlurping down a bad pizza and junk cherry drink.  Watched people in and out of the gas station.  Two guys in their forties talking intently over burgers.  Later when by himself guy pulled out a red pen and went through a stack of papers.  Math teacher at an online high school or charter school with flex hours?  

After 3 pm we watch an endless flow of ok tv.  Mostly murder series from all the euro countries and usa.  All follow same patterns.  Royal Flying Doctors in Australia a good exception.  Hospital show that flies around desolate land.  This season Va insists on tacky xmas romances so I go to the den and browse internet nonsense or read a few pages and quiz myself.  Lately I ask AI--in this novel I'm reading, who exactly is Bruno again?  Our family comes Dec 26 to Jan 3.  We go to NM Jan 7 inshallah!  Helps me to have that carrot.  

Glad you have that lake walk.  Go to a gas station, get a cup of soup and sandwich and imagine which people you see you might ask how do you like this weather or what line of work you in? 

------

we both slept in long naps after a pizza around 3 pm.  Waved hello to Arlyn as he pulled in to plow the drive around 7.  Did we get about 4 inches?  There's an app for it -- Precip.  so far we got 3.4" in past 24 hours

 

Saturday hospital call

 PT on the phone 10:12 am .  Slight stroke?  Details later.  She had a scare, in her voice.  

Cliff showed up on facebook the other day with a short clip of his walk-through part in Celine Song's great movie Materialists.  That got him an hbo invite to the season wrap party for Gilded Age at the Plaza---Cliff's old stomping grounds for when he was a sommelier there. 

Still seems some strange thing---three of my friends were in Skopje at the same time, same few months.  Although I've never pinned down whether they all three had tea together.  Cliff Rames, Nicholas Colloff, Dick Mertens.  New Jersey, UK, and Wisconsin/Chicago.  

Gray morning, heavy.  No snow but maybe some tomorrow.  Cold.  People running by the street window while we had breakfast.  

those skinny little branches with no roots or stalks coming out of the rocks with a drive for eternity 244 Antunes 

Sunday late afternoon  Going to put Melancholy II aside for now.  Start the Septology and stay with Handke.  Do I need to order another book of his?  In Left Handed Woman.  Moment of True Feeling ready for next.  

PT's news next day was all is ok.  Monday now.  Judith and Jim here to clean.  She seems a bit shakier, don't know if there is any health issue he is helping her with.  My guess.  Colder today but sun out so far.

We were deep into two series the past few days.  Royal Doctors Flying Service from Australia and Murder in a Small Town set in Gibsons BC.  Star of that show is a younger son of Donald Sutherland.  Very sensitive actor.  Co-star who plays Cassandra a great match.  The Australian team is a different hospital show, flying male nurses and a British doctor all over a vast region around Adelaide.  Where is that?  Is that on the southern rim?  Yes where the other big cities are.  

Ok in Handke's book, Left-Handed---I did not expect this!  "'Do you know what she says you are?  A private mystic.  She's right.  You are a mystic.  Damn it, you're sick.  I told Franziska a bit of electroshock would straighten you out.'"  Bruno tells her this, after just having tried to hit her.  Electroshock bit of a meme on here of late.  Thought I would put Fosse down for a rest but here Handke is stepping in to fill out the void.  Maybe need to pick up Melancholy II after all.  

Marianne is a translator from French to German.  Brussel sprouts are the one vegetable children like.  

glyphdar

 thought I had already posted that genius invention but it doesn't show up in search so here it is.  After yesterday's melancholy rant you would think today I would line up endless instances over the past eighty years, seventy years, of light flashes, intuitive mystical leaps and jumps, highs and ecstasies of every sort to counter balance counterstate the depression brought about or enabled by Fosse's dangerous book.  Well danger in the eyes of the readers.  

Dec 5 Friday

Mertens called last evening from cold Chicago, walking in deep snow.  Went to 1 degree here last night.

Finishing Journey to Serbia. Still not successful at pairing the bed remote, the second remote.  

the great Yugoslavian idea once proceeded from there---Croatia 79  But who knows? What does a stranger know?  art as the essential diversion 

the suicide note of Slobodan Nikolič, 8 October 1992   Handke's letter finished 19 December 1995

It was so detailed and immediate I doubt I understood much of it at all.  And yet at the end very briefly he makes very clear and powerful his point---the artist must try to defeat the machinery, the automatic responses, the fossilized rhetorics of journalism, of media in order to put us in touch with our commonality, our common childhoods.  Apropos of the item today from new yorker about Beckett's early years with the psychiatrist Brion.  The struggle in Jung's terms of everyone to be fully born.  

Colin coming to play piano with Bela.  We think.  Had no text exchange beforehand.  Yes he came.  William, seven, having trouble at school, poking kids with his pencil.  Colin thinks he's jealous of his younger sister, Caroline, 5.  Wants to get him outside more, burn off energy in the snow.  He thinks he needs more time with him, attention.  I agreed, suggested he do a little roughhouse with him.  

Now into Handke's Left-Handed Woman.  And Melancholy II.  Did I try to read that one before?  Perhaps.  

Marrianne and her son Stefan.  On their own.  Bruno visiting.  Wenders movie but not able to find it.  

Oline will have nothing to do with the idea of a water closet.  Sometimes she takes the fish into the outhouse built of driftwood when she is tired of the walk up hill.  Both brothers have gone on.  

Trumbauer also

Fosse's Melancholy got to me, under my skin, through my skin.  So glad I found correct information about the hospital, Eugenia Memorial.  Further looking today got old photos and more amazing information---the building was designed by Horace Trumbauer's firm!  Just like Ronale Manor and Lynnwood Hall. This from the images on facebook

Pre-Demolition Briar Hill/Eugenia Hospital

Design by Horace Trumbauer, photos taken & contributed by Deb Wilson
Horace Trumbauer built Briar Hill Mansion for William McIntyre Elkins, the grandson of traction magnate William Lukens Elkins. The estate was built between 1929 and 1930 in Whitemarsh Valley, Pennsylvania, and Elkins was a notable book collector and part of the extended Elkins-Widener family that commissioned many houses from Trumbauer.
I remember the rotunda the entrance, black marble floor as I recall.  Beautiful curving stairway up to the second floor.  Security grills on all the windows. Ugly green paint on walls and windows.  Every inch covered by heavy brown film of years of tobacco smoke hazing up the whole interior.  Brother Thomas had been taken there a day or two before I was and there were guesses and rumors about electric shock therapy.  I had a sense that the shock therapy section was in one wing and I was housed in the dormitory in the other wing and I kept fearing I would be moved.  Nothing to do but take the meds every day, sit in the common area, eat meals.  Daily or every so often we were given materials to make woven potholders, keep our fingers busy, pass the time.  Must have met with a doctor in the white coats every so often but no specific memories of that.  
Memoir of a pre-twink Catholic, or how I lost a vocation and found an otter's life.  Thing is Fosse's imagined portrait of Hertervig has none of that flip, sarcastic edge to it.  Did he work from a biography?  Must have.  By the time he wrote it Hertervig quite a national Norwegian hero. wiki Fosse was born in 1959 in Haugesund, Norway, and grew up in Strandebarm.^[10] His family were Quakers and Pietists, which he credits with shaping his spiritual views.^[11] A serious accident at age seven brought him close to death; Fosse saw a shimmering light and experienced peace and beauty: "I think this experience fundamentally changed me," Fosse recalled, "and perhaps made me a writer.^[12][13] He started writing around the age of twelve. As a teenager, Fosse was interested in becoming a rock guitarist, and he began to dedicate more time to writing once he gave up his musical ambitions.^[11] He also played the fiddle, and much of his teenage writing practice involved creating his own lyrics for musical pieces. Growing up, he was influenced by communism and anarchism and has described himself as a "hippie" 
45 years younger.  Did he commit any mortal or venial sins when he was in early adolescence.  We learned to confess impure thoughts and impure acts.  Guess what the chief act of impurity was considered to be?  Lars explores it at length.  The doctors assure him it causes his craziness and insures he will never be able to paint again.  

Masturbation was considered a cause of mental illness for 

about two centuries, from the mid-18th century until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when medical and psychological views began to shift. This belief was fueled by the 1758 publication of a Swiss physician's influential treatise linking the practice to various ailments. The association with insanity was perpetuated throughout the 19th century, but by the early 20th century, the idea was increasingly rejected as a "medical superstition"  But of course that news did not penetrate Maryland or Pennsylvania until the late 1960s.  Increasingly rejected but slowly and reluctantly.  So the way Lars feels himself treated resonated as the ways I felt considered in life deep inside the church I tried to embrace to its roots, i e by having a true vocation, being called to enter into the depths of the mysteries as to why God wanted me to be called and live the pure and perfect life of the religious life as the surest path to sainthood.  Just like Thomas Merton's great book the seven story mountain which put its blessing and romanticism for all of this over the whole of American culture for that period.  One of Kennedy's staffers came to speak to our high school class (all the way out to benighted western maryland but before that I had read Seven Storey and the novels A Separate Peace and the one by James Agee.  
Sin, guilt, shame, death, masses for the dead every morning before classes at St Marys.  Catafaulk and large black candle sticks and lighted candles, organ and voice from the choir loft singing the latin mass for the dead, the priest in that ugly black chasuble for daily use, stiff black brocade with no drape or flow whatsoever.  Sex as something wholly cloaked in secrecy and shame.  Ok, later in high school we had one class with the science teacher ready to answer any questions anyone could put forth about sexuality.  Did anyone ask if masturbation was still a venial sin or even a mortal sin under certain conditions?  Did you still need to go to confession every week, as mother nagged so often, so as to be in the worthy state of grace to go to communion on sunday morning?  
All of this tangled and retangled over the years from, I guess, 7th grade onward, or even 6th? with dad's intervention to ask his doctor to look me over and assure him I was not going to be queer.  
A lifetime of pondering these things, letting them tangle and untangle and retangle. Fosse is quite good at using simple language and endless repetition to portray this.  If you stay with it, both writing it and then reading it, surely it replicates or imitates meditative practices of all sorts.  Hindu mantras, chiefly.  Obsessive ritual as so essential to religious experiences worldwide.  Georges Bataille which did it take so long to find your work?  And those of all who like you helped everyone break away from two and more centuries of scientific idiocies beyond question.  The imperial mind, the dominance of twisted rationality.  As obsessive and endless as all such other experiences.  Art as the endless struggle to counter and reinvent.  Handke plays his role too.  Bit of a shock when he says so casually "I awoke from my nightmares with an erection, penetrated the sleeping Claire, went limp, and fell asleep again."  87  Short Letter 1972  Would he have published such a line twenty years later?  Sure, guess so.  Everything cycles and swirls no matter what regulations we attempt over the years.  
Does it do any good to rehash these things mentally or in print?  When I visited Elkins Park on my own many years later I entered the property from the back street where you could walk into the pond at the bottom of the hill on which the house was located.  Ronale Manor, Anselm Hall. The brother who was the superior when we were there was seated by the pond.  I had been to the college campus earlier and learned that it was a day celebrating his fifty years in the order.  I saw him sitting there alone, weeping, crying.  His silver hair. Recognized his whole look.  Brother Didymus John.  Such a strange first name, one I had never heard of, always remembered.  He played tennis with Kevin Douglas, John Cummins, who had gone to Anselm Hall directly from a year or two first at the merchant marine academy, he was from Pittsburgh. Did he skip the year at Ammendale?  Don't remember that.  Why did I not go further into the property, walk around the pond, and greet Brother John, remind him of who I was and wish him congratulations on is anniversary?  He after all had met with me before I departed in the spring of 1967--in mid-or late mid semester.  Sent home.  He had talked with me briefly and gave approval for canceling the temporary vows and releasing me from all obligations to the order etc etc.  I recall none of that language or detail, only in hindsight filled it in.  The one thing I remember him saying clearly was Go back home and start dating girls again.  Or start dating.  How much had Kevin ever told him about me, if anything?  Had Kevin told the house director, another brother john, more bald but gray, anything about me?  Surely he must have told him that one day that spring or the spring before when he Kevin was mowing the grass near the house I had been up on the highest floor, the fourth? in the room remodeled into a study hall with rows of oak desks made by the brother carpenters and had climbed up onto the inner edge of the largest windows (tudor style leaded glass and iron framing) the window sill and put my legs out over the will and window frame and sat there and looked down at Kevin below until he noticed me and then did I wave to him or just know that he recognized me. He walked behind a tree so I could not see him anymore.  At some point I chuckled finally to myself and said I had better go back into the room because if something happened next God himself would not have known if I had jumped or fallen.  The idea that no one would know, even myself, especially myself I guess, made me laugh a bit to myself and the laughter broke the mood, the anxiety, the cloud of fear and shame? and I got back inside. Between the two visits to Eugenia, one in November, the second in March, I was on the meds prescribed by the psychiatrist.  I drove out to see him at his office, not too far from Elkins Park, once a week for a while.  He smoked and signaled that the hour was up by putting out a cigarette and dumping the ashes accumulated in the heavy green ceramic ashtray with a round seal on it that sat in front of me, between us, marking a boundary no doubt, into a tissue and throwing them away. I think I stayed on the meds after I got home and through that summer until I started classes at College Park.  Or maybe even longer.  Upper and downer I called them, was told to call them, they felt like that, like a ceiling over and a floor under, keeping me from feeling like my normal self.  

Just back from the post office, mailing the worry bear to PT.  Street workers blocking the intersection of Highland and the street the library is on.  Big snow from yesterday all cleared, cy residues, sun melting some more.  Call from Mid-State, Va has no u t i.  
Day off not a day off as usual, but quiet.  Gray again after some sun.  Will we go to  walmart today or not?  now almost noon.  
Handke reports the strange event when Judith sent him a box wrapped in a wire attached to a battery inside so when I tried to open it further, take off the wire, he got a mild shock.  "The grass around me grew very bright, then darkened; again lizards were darting about in the corners of my eyes, the objects around me twined themselves into hieroglyphics, I ducked to avoid an insect but it was only a motorcycle droning in the distance." 122  Amazing sentence and whole passage.  He could be a bit crazy too.  Reminds me that during the night I came up with the term "glyphgar" to describe the skills I developed over the years to deal with the events that mattered to me.  In spite of all the other things surrounding them.  
Headache still.  took a sip of mild zyrtec.  now advil? or dark chocolate?  what relieves it, what causes it, is it just needing more water?  
4:24 pm  Finished Handke's Short Letter, Long Farewell  Final scene visit with John Ford after passsing through Tucson, windy, then up to Oregon to see his brother take a shit in the bushes of the logging operation, then to California to hang with Ford and tell their story.  Judith and the narrator, ready finally to part in peace.  What a strange tavelogue novel.  Would have been great for the travel course.  What to make of it?  It is brilliant, keen observations on America versus Europe.  Funny.  Detailed in millions of crisp, unusual ways.  So unusual difficult to capture, take in, break free from.  Haunting.  The torments and empty stretches the narrator goes through take us by surprise and reveal secrets not told.  Wonderful.